By Michael Cappetta, Ben Collins and Jo Ling Kent
The conservative lobbying firm that Facebook hired in the midst of an October 2017 public relations crisis about Russian disinformation included what one former employee told NBC News was an “in-house fake news shop” as part of its operations.
Facebook’s ties to the lobbying firm, Definers Public Affairs, were first reported on Wednesday in The New York Times, which detailed how the group aimed to “discredit activist protesters [of Facebook], in part by linking them to liberal financier George Soros,” who has become the subject of widespread right-wing conspiracy theories for his philanthropy work.
The report resulted in widespread criticism and accusations of hypocrisy by Facebook for its use of a lobbying firm that pushed narratives on behalf of its clients disguised as news articles. And some of the firm’s more inflammatory political ads for other clients were removed by Facebook itself for violating its advertising policies.
Definers runs a website called NTK Network, which has a verified page on Facebook with more than 120,000 followers that publishes and promotes articles about the firm’s clients as well as their competitors.
A former employee of Definers, who asked not to be identified in order to protect professional relationships, told NBC News that NTK Network was “our in-house fake news shop.” Some clients would actively pay for NTK Network’s positive coverage, which the ex-employee said would then be pushed out through Facebook in the hopes of being picked up by larger conservative media outlets such as Breitbart.
One article currently being promoted on Facebook through NTK Network’s page promotes the page as having “the latest stories without the liberal bias,” according to Facebook’s publicly available ad index.
The former employee told NBC News the company would run positive stories about clients “at the end of the day” simply to “fill up space” on NTK Network’s website and feed, even if they didn’t specifically pay for NTK’s suite of services through Definers.
A NTK Network ad on Facebook.
A NTK Network ad on Facebook.Facebook
NTK is currently running an ad to promote a story published on Tuesday headlined “Conservatives Blast ITC Judge’s Ruling on Apple,” which refers to a patent dispute between Apple and Qualcomm. The former employee claimed Qualcomm had a relationship with Definers.
Qualcomm and Apple declined to comment.
The revelation highlights how public relations firms like Definers have been able to move beyond efforts to seed stories in the press on behalf of their clients and can now promote their own articles on Facebook in the guise of news, just as Russia promoted misinformation and divisive political rhetoric through disguised media publications. And now it turns out that Facebook was not just the platform for this kind of opposition work, but had actually hired a practitioner to do so on its behalf.
“After a year of increasingly worrying revelations about the scourge of misinformation on Facebook, it is still shocking to learn that Facebook itself employed the same tactics that bad actors have used to exploit its platform,” Justin Hendrix, executive director at NYC Media Lab, a university consortium focused on media technology, said.
“How can we ever trust this company?” Hendrix said. “It is apparently more willing to use misinformation tactics than to seriously police them.”
NTK Network declined to comment.